‘Will the West Survive until 2028?’ – Variations on the Theme of the End of History from Spengler to Fukuyama

A hybrid public European studies lecture by Dr Dariusz Gafijczuk (Newcastle University) organised by the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies.

As places are limited, please feel free to join online here.

The past has a future we never expect (Javier Marías)
In a now largely forgotten essay provocatively entitled Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? published fifty odd years ago, the Soviet dissident writer Andrei Amalrik (1938-1980) at a time when no one dared to imagine it, predicted the end of the Soviet state and society. He proposed 1984 as the year of Soviet Union’s demise. Deliberately evoking Orwell, Amalrik’s conclusion as to the impact of this world-shattering event to come was ambiguous. Neither Orwellian nor euphoric, it was certainly nothing resembling the much discussed ‘end of history’. The ‘end’ did eventually come, in 1989, and then again in 1990, and 1991, as the structural elements of the Eastern bloc fell away.
But what precisely, if anything, had ended?
I explore this question by taking a closer look at the various manifestations of ‘endings’ in recent past. The range of this exploration will take us, roughly speaking, back to Oswald Spengler’s untimely magnum opus The Decline of the West, written over three years before the war but only published in 1918 and wrongly taken as commentary on the cataclysmic events just concluded, to Fukuyama’s seemingly timely but soon to be outdated commentary on 1989. This kind of comparative structure reveals the past’s unexpected future. For it might in the end be Spengler’s living history of false forms (pseudomorphosis) and not Fukuyama’s liberal democracy as the final stage of historical development with its specific fusion of desire and demand for recognition (thymos), that will carry the day beyond the historical cul de sac of our own making.
Dr Dariusz Gafijczuk is a lecturer in sociology at Newcastle University, formerly at Trinity College and a Sir Isaac Newton Fellow at Lancaster University. His research focusses on cultural sociology, Central Europe, and social theory.

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: ruthnerc@tcd.ie